The instant invention relates to a collating machine and more particularly to a collating machine having the dual capability of stacking sheets of paper in the same or reverse order in which they are fed to the collating machine.
Collating machines are frequently used in line with other paper handling equipment as a means of assembling a plurality of sheets of paper into a particular, desired packet prior to further processing, which may include additional collating, folding and inserting. For further background, reference can be made to U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,766,569 and 4,143,98. In a typical paper handling sequence involving an initial output consisting of a plurality of sheets of paper, to be later combined with subsequent output from other sheet feeding devices situated downstream, the initial output is fed from a stack seriatim to the collator, which collates the output into the desired packets, either in the same order as the sheets had when they were in the stack upstream of the collator or the reverse order. Each packet may then be folded, stitched or subsequently combined with other output from document feeding devices located downstream thereof and ultimately inserted into a mailing envelope.
In many cases it happens that the initial output to be collated arrives in an opposite order from that desired for downstream processing so that the collator needs to collate in an opposite manner to enable the documents to emerge from the collator in the proper sequence for subsequent handling. In such a case, one option is to have a second line of paper handling equipment which includes a collator having reverse collating capability. Clearly, this is not a desirable option to users of paper handling equipment. An improvement over the second line option is offered in U.S. Pat. No. 4,640,506 issued Feb. 3, 1987 to the assignee of the instant application which teaches the incorporation in the collating machine of removable reverse order stacking devices. However, incorporating and removing machine parts require time and effort which can be very costly for complex equipment which can afford little down time. Accordingly, the instant invention provides not a removable device, but rather simply a movable device in a collating machine which is easily moved by an operator from one position to another to change from regular sequence stacking to reverse sequence stacking. Movement of the movable device can be effected by a machine operator in less than a few seconds' time, and in most cases should require no more than one second of an operator's time.